09.25.2006
COUCH POTATO //
I have one towel. I need to wash it. But every time I look into my laundry basket, I just don't have enough for a load. When you don't go outside and just wear boxers all day, it takes a while to fill up the washer with just underwear. Since I work from home I have very little human contact. My days consist of alternating between sitting in front of the tv and then sitting in front of the computer. Sometimes I try to mix it up a little and watch tv while I'm sitting in front of the computer. I live a very rich life. Some of you might think that it's not a healthy life style. You are right. I get some pretty intense butt cramps. With all of the frozen tv dinners I've been eating, I'm afraid that my isometrics will one day result in a horrible accident. At least it'll get me one more pair closer to laundry day.



09.20.2006
HOUYOU OSORE //
Fear has probably been one of the strongest driving forces in my life. It's been a constant that I've allowed to influence me from the major decisions to the mundane: the degree I pursued in college, the jobs I've taken, my refusal to take dumps in public restrooms. I'm afraid of not being accepted, of failing, and of being alone. So in a pre-emptive strike there are many things I never even tried so the things I feared wouldn't have a chance to become reality. In my moments of introspection and struggle (read: on the toilet), I often look back with some regret on the life that could've been or might be but never was because I was too chicken s*** to take a chance: the career I don't have, the experiences I didn't know, and the sweet honey babies that clearly wanted me that I spurned. Okay, now I'm being ridiculous.

I know it's too late to re-write chapters of my spent life, but maybe life can begin again at 30. I have ambitions that I always wanted to accomplish and there may yet be still time. One day I will go on a cruise-that great floating restaurant on the open seas, and I will face the fear of overhearing geriatric sex through paper thin cabin walls. One day I will actually bring my moments of introspection and struggle to a public bathroom and face-okay I'm being ridiculous again. That will never happen. I'll die from fecal poisoning first. But for these days I've been learning Japanese. It's something I always wanted to do. Will I ever use it? Konrinzai! Will I be horrible at it? Hai! So why am I even bothering? Well for one, when you speak Japanese as if you are pissed, it sounds really badass. And second, it's the natural evolution in my journey to become the Renaissance Asian. I'm already cheap like a Chinese, chauvinistic like a Korean, and hentai like a Japanese (My friend described my last youtube link as "kiddie porn." In my defense a 16 year old in East Texas would already be a mother of 2). It's time to start talking like one.



09.16.2006
FASHION NON-SENSE //
Wearing pants is so over-rated. Of course it's still a perplexing mystery to me why I haven't had a date since the Clinton administration. What I'm saying is that it's routinely in the mid 90's in Austin and yet when I go out everyday, all I see are people wearing pants. And when I say everyday, I mean once a week. I'm not talking about my regular bank teller, my regular HEB check out girl or my regular cashier at Bed Bath and Beyond. Um, scratch that last one. I'm talking about the typical semi-employed, pretentious slacker. In other words, me in $200 pair of Diesel jeans. What's wrong with shorts? Dudes nowadays wear polos and tees two sizes too small, but are shy about showing a little leg flesh? And what's with these really long shorts or really short pants I see them rocking? They are called capris people. I haven't even owned a pair of jeans in almost a decade.

I really felt the pain though of just having 2 pairs of pants during a half year long Chinese winter. I've figured out a few things about long johns. Wearing them under a short sleeved shirt: acceptable. Wearing them under shorts: not so much. Here's another problem though: I'm 5'5 with a 27 inch waist. I can't buy men's pants because I'm too small, but I don't want to buy boys pants because I really don't need 38 pockets and I don't like blue camo.



09.11.2006
DISPLACED //
I am a man out of time. I left this country and after returning a year later I have a Rip Van Winkle complex, except that my beard that I've been working on for the last two decades is about 40 wispy hairs. It's disorienting when life has gone on for you, but you still have an illogical sub-conscious expectation that things and people will still be the same. It's even more illogical when I'm startled by how much life has gone on for everyone else. Everyone seems inherently the same but yet radically different: people have gotten married, people have gotten pregnant, and people have moved on. Yesterday I went to a church I helped start and friends were talking about it using an exclusive "we." People who I was friends with look at me as if I step through from another dimension. "How many years have you been gone?" is one of the most oft asked question. I now know how Superman must have felt when he came back from his pilgrimage to Krypton, minus the self-esteem to pull of that skin suit and glorious codpiece. I know I'm still the same self-absorbed, socially awkward misogynist. I was nearly devastated when I couldn't find my favorite beer because it's no longer brewed. This is not the world I once knew.



09.07.2006
CHUY'S //
They say you should never enter a Chinese restaurant from the kitchen, or you'll just keep walking straight out through the front door. Well in China the area where you actually eat often looks like the kitchen or the bathroom. I've seen kitchens at some of these dives. They look like torture chambers. If these places existed in America the EPA would probably quarantine the restaurant and smother it with concrete. But, when in Rome. So after a year I came back, took some de-worming pills, and it's been business as usual.

The other night I went to Chuy's with my dad. Great Tex-Mex and the best chips and salsa. For the last decade I've always gotten the same thing, steak burrito. For some reason it tasted weird but I just tried to power through. About half way I told my dad to try it and after just a whiff he said "that meat is spoiled, I'm not eating it." This from the guy who does the cottage cheese peaches abomination. When I went home I felt okay but figured that maybe I was in the eye of a hurricane and in a couple hours the perfect storm was going to break in my toilet. Hours roll by. Nothing. I feel like China trained my stomach sort of like when Jean Claude Van Damme had coconuts dropped on him from a tree in Kickboxer. A smart person would count their blessings and lay low for a while. I went back for more a couple days later. Don't mis-underestimate me.



09.03.2006
TO RANDY ON HIS 30TH BIRTHDAY //
For those who have been keeping track at home, I've mentioned that I'm turning 30 about 800 times in the last couple months. Well here's one more, except that today it actually happened. When most people hit 40 they have a mid-life crisis and do something completely ridiculous to over-compensate for the loss of their long passed youth, like buy an expensive sports car or get a perm. But at 30 you have a career crisis. It takes most of your 20's to get to know yourself and what you are passionate about and the rest of the time eating 96 cent frozen pizzas and playing video games in your boxers alone until 6 am. Wait, that was last night.

Anyhow it feels like it wasn't that long ago that you just graduated and then one morning you wake up and you're 3 decades old. And you're looking at your pseudo-career wondering if this is what you want to do for the rest of your life, and if it too late to do something else like be a millionaire playboy. A lot of people also have a list of things they want to have accomplished by now. Maybe they are markers of official manhood. I always wanted to see what it'd be like dating two girls at once (hell, how about even one?). I've never had a chance to sucker punch someone in a bar. It's also been a dream of mine to be on a game show/competitive reality base show. Sadly, I'm 0-3 and I wonder, by my own definition, if I'm not a really a man. Actually the check out chick at HEB wondered aloud the same thing when I tried to buy beer.



09.01.2006
BARE ESSENTIALS //
have in my mind the ultimate bachelor pad. Not the kind that has a disco ball, a neon Miller Lite sign, or a poster of 2 girls making out (although that would be hot). My furniture being shipped from China is going on taking 3 months to get here (I expect it around the time Harrison Ford makes another watchable movie). This is pretty much my apartment: I have my big screen tv and one chair that my roommate and I take turns sitting in when the other is playing NCAA 2006. And there's a lamp. For a dining table we eat over the sink. There is more stuff in the freezer than the fridge. If you didn't know it, it looks like we are actually getting ready to move out. In the meantime I'm going to be adding a few touches to make the place more livable. I just got online and bought that poster.